I don't know about your l337 names, but if you want your child to have their self-confidence buoyed by positive energy every time they enter a room, name your kid Yahtzee. No one can say "Yahtzee" without excessive exuberance and enthusiasm.
It is about blame, but I don't think it's about being held blameless when you are powerless as you suggest. I've seen similar things in other business decisions - lots of people when faced with making an important decision will want to be slightly conservative. Suppose that something goes wrong - would a CEO, who likely does not care about technical details, be more likely to hold you accountable for choosing a product from one of the most well known and ubiquitous software manufacturers in the world or for choosing a "fringe" product made by a bunch of hippies?
It's an exponential process - as Linux gains acceptance and recognition the less backbone it will take to recommend it and so Linux will go on to gain more acceptance and recognition...
By way of example, one of the axioms is that parallel lines never meet. We don't actually know if that's true, but it's pretty close. If we do turn out to live in a curved universe, we'll have to throw away some bits of maths.
You are correct that math and logic require basic unproven assertions that "nothing is provably 'true' on its own merits". But math is not about truth. No piece of math will ever have to be thrown away!
Geomoetries in which the parallel postulate you mention are different than the Euclidean are just as consistent and logical as those with different ones. They can even be useful:
If, given a line and a point not on that line, you have exactly one line through that point which is parallel to the first, you are dealing with a Euclidean plain. Architects and Engineers love this one. Alternately, if there is more than one line through that point parallel to the first, then we are in a hyperbolic space. Physicists and Astronomers tend to like this one, but whether the universe is Euclidean or hyperbolic it does not in any way invalidate these geometric notions. In fact, if you take the axiom where there are NO parallel lines you are in a "spherical" geometry which is really handy for navigation.
As originally laid out by the US Constitution and early law, copyrights were limited exclusive rights for reproduction and distribution of creative works. Limited - limited by "fair use" and time. I believe this is a good real world compromise that works with human nature - allowing those creative folks to be creative and make a living AND that lets others for whom that creativity inspires go on to their own creations. I don't believe that the original intent was copyrights/patents to be property but rather a short-term license.
The slow evolution, by the corporations, that has eroded fair-use and effectively eliminated the limits is what is evil.
No discussion on IP is complete without reference to Thomas Jeffeson: If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it...He who receives an idea from me, receives instructions himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should be spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature... Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property
Even so I disagree that IP is "working as intended". The intent of IP law is to promote the creation of new ideas. It does this in two ways. Offers a monopoly to the inventor so they can earn a living (i.e. so they have a reason to create) and two, LIMITS the monopoly so that the ideas are returned to the community in order to foster more creativity.
I think the balance is appropriate and can work - but right now it is badly broken. Copyrights never expire and software patents (even if they were correctly issued) have an expiration period far in excess of current software cycles.
I'm not so sure about that - not all bosses are pointy-haired. If the company lawyers were making the hiring decisions then maybe. I am a supervisor and when we hire programmers I am the one making the final decisions. I'd say that if my company had a crap policy like that, I'd be more tempted to hire the people who objected rather than the sheep who knuckle under. I want people who not only think outside the box but also refuse to be pigeon-holed into a box.
If the company refused to modify their agreement, is it a place that you will enjoy working?
I'm a sci-fi buff and I would like nothing better than to see us get back into manned exploration. Even so at first I was dubious about the merits of saving a rusted tower... but then I remembered my visit to the Kennedy Space Center several years ago. The center, and especially the Saturn V exhibit was fantastic - informative and inspirational. Preserving the tower would remind us of the scale and reality of what we have achieved was. Amidst movies and special effects I think it's easy to forget how hard we worked to get to the moon - and how much more work there is to do.
That being said, I'm not sure it should be NASA's money to do it - people like me ought to pony up some bucks to make it happen!
You are right that MY use of POPFile doesn't directly impact the spammer - it merely saves me a lot of time. But by installing it for friends, family, and neighbors and generally advocating it (or other solutions), it does stop *some* spam from getting to *some* suckers. That, in turn, will (eventually) affect their response rates and their profit margins.
I think it's more than no problem - what I believe he is saying is that a Bayesian filter will evolve some "ham" words that will carry an email into an inbox. They are individual and hard to figure out, but there is no reason why a spammer can't append your ham words, my ham words, and everybody else's ham words to the same message and thus bypass all our filters. So instead of the random "word salad" that we would see, we'd be getting a non-random selection of known ham words.
Even if the HTML business didn't work, spammers still have a mechanism for gauging effectiveness - money. They can assume a fairly even distribution of suckers and start sending out groups of messages with random words and, with some analysis, probably eventually come up with some statistically significant ham words.
Perhaps in addition to trading email addresses, ham word lists will also start to be traded. The anti-spam/spam industry will evolve like insurance and re-insurance : whoever has the best actuary will win.
Over time the ham words would also change - I wonder if the fight against spam will start having a noticable effect on our use of language?
Yes - POPFile is fantastic! Since April 4th, my filter is 99.47% accurate at sorting my mail into 6 buckets. Over 18,000 spams have disappeared without me seeing them.
While it is true that I still have to waste bandwidth and CPU cycles to get rid of this unwanted mail, I no longer have to waste time. I've got my parents, friends, and neighbors all hooked up with POPFile - I believe this is realistically the only way to fight spam - move the decimal place on their success ratio over a couple notches; dig into their bottom line.
When my dad was in the Navy there was a cost-cutting initiative to reduce wasted paper. Somebody noticed that there was a lot of blank space around the edges of typed text and decided that the best way to reduce these margins was to use 8 x 10 1/2 inch paper.
It was abandoned when they figured out the special sized paper was more expensive. My dad still has a ream of the stuff.
I had pretty much the same thoughts for quite a while - until last week. I installed the latest Mozilla, spent a little time playing with it and now am in the process of switching. The tabbed browsing is awesome. The UI still isn't as good (not as flexible on the task bar as IE), but the tabs make up for it for me.
Change the skin first thing - the old Netscape look really rubbed me the wrong way. Spend a little time on the preferences. I think it's worth another look!
I was the shadow of the waxwing slain By the false azure in the windowpane; I was the smudge of ashen fluff--and I Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky. And from the inside, too, I'd duplicate Myself, my lamp, an apple on a plate: Uncurtaining the night, I'd let dark glass Hang all the furniture above the grass, And how delightful when a fall of snow Covered my glimpse of lawn and reached up so As to make chair and bed exactly stand Upon that snow, out in that crystal land!
Like I said, you don't have to agree with his reasons, but he does tell you what was on his mind. As I recall, in that case (and I agree that I don't quite get it), he felt it was important to separate Aragorn from the rest of the party. The reason for that, and the reason for having the elves come to Helm's Deep, is to increase the tension building up to the battle. He modeled what happened after Zulu. There you have a hopelessly outnumbered force about to be crushed. You don't want your audience totally depressed, so you bring in a couple small groups of people to help out - give the audience something to cheer about.
Actually, now that I think about it, it kind of reminds me of when in the books Tolkien describes all of the forces coming into Gondor to prepar for the siege - Prince Imrahil and all that. The audience feels good that something good is happening, but we know it won't be enough unless something else happens. Thus the tension is ratcheted up a notch.
If you are truly interested, Jackson's commentaries on the extended DVDs pretty much give the why for a lot of the departures. One may not agree with them, but he does explain a lot of his reasoning.
Keeping the story moving and increasing the dramatic tension were the underlying motives behind most of the changes.
I just got an i700 a week ago and I love it! I don't think it's fair to blast it for being a PDA first and a phone second - one look at it and you can tell what it's about.
Even though it's bigger than most cell phones, it's still smaller and lighter than most land-line handsets. I find the speakerphone to be a feature - hand and head free talking, very convenient. I certainly don't find the phone hard to use - there are hardware buttons on the front with pictures of phones on them - push the left one and the phone keypad comes up. It's got speed dial slots, and the phone book is the contacts application and so is approximately 5 million times easier to navigate and edit than any regular cell phone phone book I've ever seen.
Some ring tones are annoying, but one can choose subtle ones just as easily as obnoxious ones.
The camera I don't really care about - very low resolution and it has some vingetting issues, but I didn't buy it for the camera.
Battery life is an issue - but in the box they ship two batteries.
Not perfect, but the integration with wireless data and ability to use it as a wireless modem makes it very versatile and useful to me. Far better than anything else I've experimented with.
Boy, reading through these posts I have never seen such an accumulation of bad vibes and negativity. Even articles about Micro$oft, SCO, and DRM are not such downers!
Well, I for one have enjoyed the Star Wars movies. I'm not saying they are the best movies ever, but as pieces of entertainment they have done the job - I don't begrudge the price of a single ticket, or even the popcorn I ate while watching. If Lucas makes some more, I'll probably go see them too. Why not?
Slashdot Mirror
For a hands-on example, get your own zero-volume, non-orientable klein bottle here.
Exactly - Occam's Razor.
Do I smell a new business model here?
I'm sure you would smell something by putting a bunch of overweight folks on excercise bikes...
I don't know about your l337 names, but if you want your child to have their self-confidence buoyed by positive energy every time they enter a room, name your kid Yahtzee. No one can say "Yahtzee" without excessive exuberance and enthusiasm.
It is about blame, but I don't think it's about being held blameless when you are powerless as you suggest. I've seen similar things in other business decisions - lots of people when faced with making an important decision will want to be slightly conservative. Suppose that something goes wrong - would a CEO, who likely does not care about technical details, be more likely to hold you accountable for choosing a product from one of the most well known and ubiquitous software manufacturers in the world or for choosing a "fringe" product made by a bunch of hippies?
It's an exponential process - as Linux gains acceptance and recognition the less backbone it will take to recommend it and so Linux will go on to gain more acceptance and recognition...
By way of example, one of the axioms is that parallel lines never meet. We don't actually know if that's true, but it's pretty close. If we do turn out to live in a curved universe, we'll have to throw away some bits of maths.
You are correct that math and logic require basic unproven assertions that "nothing is provably 'true' on its own merits". But math is not about truth. No piece of math will ever have to be thrown away!
Geomoetries in which the parallel postulate you mention are different than the Euclidean are just as consistent and logical as those with different ones. They can even be useful:
If, given a line and a point not on that line, you have exactly one line through that point which is parallel to the first, you are dealing with a Euclidean plain. Architects and Engineers love this one. Alternately, if there is more than one line through that point parallel to the first, then we are in a hyperbolic space. Physicists and Astronomers tend to like this one, but whether the universe is Euclidean or hyperbolic it does not in any way invalidate these geometric notions. In fact, if you take the axiom where there are NO parallel lines you are in a "spherical" geometry which is really handy for navigation.
I just wish I looked like that - back in the day I still had hair to style!
I agree with Jefferson, but I disagree with you.
Some very non-eloquent paraphrasing:
Jefferson : Ideas cannot be property.
You : "The whole idea of IP is truly evil."
As originally laid out by the US Constitution and early law, copyrights were limited exclusive rights for reproduction and distribution of creative works. Limited - limited by "fair use" and time. I believe this is a good real world compromise that works with human nature - allowing those creative folks to be creative and make a living AND that lets others for whom that creativity inspires go on to their own creations. I don't believe that the original intent was copyrights/patents to be property but rather a short-term license.
The slow evolution, by the corporations, that has eroded fair-use and effectively eliminated the limits is what is evil.
No discussion on IP is complete without reference to Thomas Jeffeson: ... Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it...He who receives an idea from me, receives instructions himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should be spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature
Even so I disagree that IP is "working as intended". The intent of IP law is to promote the creation of new ideas. It does this in two ways. Offers a monopoly to the inventor so they can earn a living (i.e. so they have a reason to create) and two, LIMITS the monopoly so that the ideas are returned to the community in order to foster more creativity.
I think the balance is appropriate and can work - but right now it is badly broken. Copyrights never expire and software patents (even if they were correctly issued) have an expiration period far in excess of current software cycles.
I'm not so sure about that - not all bosses are pointy-haired. If the company lawyers were making the hiring decisions then maybe. I am a supervisor and when we hire programmers I am the one making the final decisions. I'd say that if my company had a crap policy like that, I'd be more tempted to hire the people who objected rather than the sheep who knuckle under. I want people who not only think outside the box but also refuse to be pigeon-holed into a box.
If the company refused to modify their agreement, is it a place that you will enjoy working?
I'm a sci-fi buff and I would like nothing better than to see us get back into manned exploration. Even so at first I was dubious about the merits of saving a rusted tower... but then I remembered my visit to the Kennedy Space Center several years ago. The center, and especially the Saturn V exhibit was fantastic - informative and inspirational. Preserving the tower would remind us of the scale and reality of what we have achieved was. Amidst movies and special effects I think it's easy to forget how hard we worked to get to the moon - and how much more work there is to do.
That being said, I'm not sure it should be NASA's money to do it - people like me ought to pony up some bucks to make it happen!
You are right that MY use of POPFile doesn't directly impact the spammer - it merely saves me a lot of time. But by installing it for friends, family, and neighbors and generally advocating it (or other solutions), it does stop *some* spam from getting to *some* suckers. That, in turn, will (eventually) affect their response rates and their profit margins.
Would these be the same advisors that told him about the WMD in Iraq?
I think it's more than no problem - what I believe he is saying is that a Bayesian filter will evolve some "ham" words that will carry an email into an inbox. They are individual and hard to figure out, but there is no reason why a spammer can't append your ham words, my ham words, and everybody else's ham words to the same message and thus bypass all our filters. So instead of the random "word salad" that we would see, we'd be getting a non-random selection of known ham words.
Even if the HTML business didn't work, spammers still have a mechanism for gauging effectiveness - money. They can assume a fairly even distribution of suckers and start sending out groups of messages with random words and, with some analysis, probably eventually come up with some statistically significant ham words.
Perhaps in addition to trading email addresses, ham word lists will also start to be traded. The anti-spam/spam industry will evolve like insurance and re-insurance : whoever has the best actuary will win.
Over time the ham words would also change - I wonder if the fight against spam will start having a noticable effect on our use of language?
Yes - POPFile is fantastic! Since April 4th, my filter is 99.47% accurate at sorting my mail into 6 buckets. Over 18,000 spams have disappeared without me seeing them.
While it is true that I still have to waste bandwidth and CPU cycles to get rid of this unwanted mail, I no longer have to waste time. I've got my parents, friends, and neighbors all hooked up with POPFile - I believe this is realistically the only way to fight spam - move the decimal place on their success ratio over a couple notches; dig into their bottom line.
When my dad was in the Navy there was a cost-cutting initiative to reduce wasted paper. Somebody noticed that there was a lot of blank space around the edges of typed text and decided that the best way to reduce these margins was to use 8 x 10 1/2 inch paper.
It was abandoned when they figured out the special sized paper was more expensive. My dad still has a ream of the stuff.
I had pretty much the same thoughts for quite a while - until last week. I installed the latest Mozilla, spent a little time playing with it and now am in the process of switching. The tabbed browsing is awesome. The UI still isn't as good (not as flexible on the task bar as IE), but the tabs make up for it for me.
Change the skin first thing - the old Netscape look really rubbed me the wrong way. Spend a little time on the preferences. I think it's worth another look!
From Pale Fire by V. Nabokov:
I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane;
I was the smudge of ashen fluff--and I
Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.
And from the inside, too, I'd duplicate
Myself, my lamp, an apple on a plate:
Uncurtaining the night, I'd let dark glass
Hang all the furniture above the grass,
And how delightful when a fall of snow
Covered my glimpse of lawn and reached up so
As to make chair and bed exactly stand
Upon that snow, out in that crystal land!
Great book!
Like I said, you don't have to agree with his reasons, but he does tell you what was on his mind. As I recall, in that case (and I agree that I don't quite get it), he felt it was important to separate Aragorn from the rest of the party. The reason for that, and the reason for having the elves come to Helm's Deep, is to increase the tension building up to the battle. He modeled what happened after Zulu. There you have a hopelessly outnumbered force about to be crushed. You don't want your audience totally depressed, so you bring in a couple small groups of people to help out - give the audience something to cheer about.
Actually, now that I think about it, it kind of reminds me of when in the books Tolkien describes all of the forces coming into Gondor to prepar for the siege - Prince Imrahil and all that. The audience feels good that something good is happening, but we know it won't be enough unless something else happens. Thus the tension is ratcheted up a notch.
If you are truly interested, Jackson's commentaries on the extended DVDs pretty much give the why for a lot of the departures. One may not agree with them, but he does explain a lot of his reasoning.
Keeping the story moving and increasing the dramatic tension were the underlying motives behind most of the changes.
Well, it's already been done - remember Voyager? Check out this hot action that was among the images sent out into space on the Voyager spacecraft!
I don't think "lurid" is the best description; I found it to be informative and well written. But even so - what's wrong with rubbernecking?
I agree - I kept thinking "Watergate, Watergate, when are they going to mention Watergate?"
I just got an i700 a week ago and I love it! I don't think it's fair to blast it for being a PDA first and a phone second - one look at it and you can tell what it's about.
Even though it's bigger than most cell phones, it's still smaller and lighter than most land-line handsets. I find the speakerphone to be a feature - hand and head free talking, very convenient. I certainly don't find the phone hard to use - there are hardware buttons on the front with pictures of phones on them - push the left one and the phone keypad comes up. It's got speed dial slots, and the phone book is the contacts application and so is approximately 5 million times easier to navigate and edit than any regular cell phone phone book I've ever seen.
Some ring tones are annoying, but one can choose subtle ones just as easily as obnoxious ones.
The camera I don't really care about - very low resolution and it has some vingetting issues, but I didn't buy it for the camera.
Battery life is an issue - but in the box they ship two batteries.
Not perfect, but the integration with wireless data and ability to use it as a wireless modem makes it very versatile and useful to me. Far better than anything else I've experimented with.
Boy, reading through these posts I have never seen such an accumulation of bad vibes and negativity. Even articles about Micro$oft, SCO, and DRM are not such downers!
Well, I for one have enjoyed the Star Wars movies. I'm not saying they are the best movies ever, but as pieces of entertainment they have done the job - I don't begrudge the price of a single ticket, or even the popcorn I ate while watching. If Lucas makes some more, I'll probably go see them too. Why not?